Digital River Unbundles Its Commerce Stack, Breaking Open an Unparalleled Suite of Possibilities for Merchants and Shoppers Alike

Digital River, the most experienced global ecommerce enabler for established and fast-growing brands, announced today that it has transitioned to a “headless” approach, building out its suite of APIs and microservices. This move enables brands to combine best-of-breed solutions from multiple providers to create a flexible ecommerce offering designed to meet increasingly complex shopper demands globally.

This shift to a more agile and modular solution allows Digital River to meet the changing expectations of shoppers and merchants alike, while helping brands accelerate expansion into new markets around the world. By focusing on its core offerings—including order management, global payments and risk protection—while aligning with key strategic partners for digital experience and commerce solutions, Digital River can help brands create comprehensive and customized solutions to grow internationally.

To stay competitive in today’s fast-paced world, brands must stay focused on customer acquisition and retention by delivering unique and engaging buying experiences across touchpoints. Brands must do this while managing immense complexity in the back-end requirements of selling online, particularly when selling on a global scale. By breaking apart a monolithic commerce solution and embracing a more agile and modular offering, brands can offload these back-end complexities to Digital River while maintaining control over the front-end shopper experience.

Simply put, a brand can continue to use its existing web content management system (WCMS) or commerce provider, while gaining the benefit of Digital River’s unparalleled expertise in global payment acceptance, tax laws, compliance regulations, and fraud protection. This allows brands to offer a truly localized approach to ecommerce in each individual market without undertaking the complexity or cost of a complete commerce solution change.

“The way brands buy ecommerce solutions has changed. Sophisticated brands are looking to integrate multiple best-of-breed products to create a customized solution that creates a seamless buying experience,” said Adam Coyle, CEO of Digital River. “To accomplish this, we made the strategic decision to further unbundle our solutions through APIs and microservices, and build a partner ecosystem for seamless integrations. It’s exciting to see the possibilities created for our clients as we offer them flexibility in how they consume our core offering.”

“It was clear we needed to deconstruct our monolithic technology stack to meet market needs for more agile and modular commerce solutions,” commented James Gagliardi, chief product officer for Digital River. “To complement our strengths around order management, payments and risk protection services like tax, fraud and regulatory compliance, we are now relying on top-echelon partners with top-tier solutions in other areas to provide brands with unprecedented value in one powerful solution.”

To offer clients better service and the agility required to meet ever-changing shopper preferences, Digital River is expanding partnerships in unlikely places. Long-time commerce competitors are now collaborating in new ways. In June, Salesforce announced that Digital River is launching as a partner on its B2B Commerce AppExchange. This is the first of multiple partnerships and technology integrations Digital River will bring to market this year.

“Traditional ecommerce approaches have completely flipped upside down as merchants now require agility and control when it comes to their operations, and that’s why we’ve moved to an API-first and partner-focused strategy,” said Michael French, head of global partnerships for Digital River. “For us, that means stepping away from full-stack architecture to best-of-breed solutions that allow brands to select from Digital River’s ecosystem of partners, or plug in their own solutions, when building their own unique architecture. So far, the level of engagement we’ve seen from solution partners throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia/Pacific has exceeded our expectations, and we look forward to working closely with our partners to fulfill the needs of their clients.”

With 25 years’ experience, Digital River has mastered the ins and outs of global ecommerce. Established and fast-growing brands alike rely on our flexible, API-powered solutions to sell direct to their customers, whether they live around the corner or around the world. Our modular platform, global expertise, and advanced partner ecosystem lets brands focus on creating seamless buyer experiences, while we work behind the scenes to manage orders and fulfilment, process payments, mitigate fraud, and handle taxes and compliance on your behalf. Brands benefit from our unique business model, expertly designed to help brands accelerate global expansion, grow revenue, and protect their business from risk.

Digital River is headquartered in Minneapolis with offices across the U.S., Asia, Europe and South America. For more details, visit https://digitalriver.com.

Digital River is a registered trademark of Digital River, Inc. All other company and product names are trademarks, registrations or copyrights of their respective owners.

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